Mirror associate editor Kevin Maguire says local authorities are the backbone of communities and councillors will affect our lives more than the MEPs

This argument may be unfashionable but the local councillors elected later this month will often have more impact on people’s lives than the MEPs picked on the same day.

In the frenzy created by swivel-eyed loons who shun Brussels Sprouts as a federalist plot to enslave Britons, we’re ignoring local democracy.

Councillors are rarely national figures unless they say something nasty, as one did in Cornwall when he suggested disabled children should be “put down” to save money.

Yet local authorities are the backbone of communities, providing services and the body most of us turn to when a problem occurs in the area.

The 4,200 councillors elected a week this Thursday in London and many urban parts of England, as well as Northern Ireland, have a direct impact on our lives.

Local government’s powers have been eroded by successive governments. The ConDem coalition imposing brutal austerity is Communities Secretary Eric Pickles giving English councils the choice of what to cut.

Education Secretary Michael Gove is centralising control of schools on himself – and academies and the free schools often prove an expensive waste of money while reporting to him in Whitehall instead of the local council.

But from education to social services, potholes to parking, a council’s decisions have a big impact on your life. Who runs the council is far more important to most of us than which party sends the most MEPs to sit in Brussels.

The xenophobes who bang on all day about the evils of Brussels, exaggerating the importance of European laws, are the pub bores of these elections.

Individual Britons and communities stand to gain most if Whitehall devolved spending and decisions to local government. Brussels returning influence to London is the diversionary wail of kneejerkers who prefer to blame people overseas instead of looking for answers closer to home.

I acknowledge the European results are important too and will grab the headlines the weekend after next. Everybody has a vote for Britain’s 73 MEPs, European polls being the only occasions outside general elections when the entire nation chooses representatives on the same day.

The rise of Nigel Farage’s Purple Shirts, his anti-immigrant rabble tipped to top the EU poll, is a vote for hate over hope.

And the Euro results will send tremors through the three main parties at Westminster.

Foreign Secretary William Hague acknowledges that when he was Tory leader the Cons won the 1999 EU contest then were thumped by Labour at the 2001 General Election.

The same fate may await Farage’s Purple Shirts though a bad result will leave Nick Clegg on a life support machine, David Cameron engulfed by another rebellion and Ed Miliband busy calming nerves when Labour really should top the poll.

But the people elected on May 22 who will really have a say over our lives are the councillors.

So let’s acknowledge their importance. They may be at the bottom of the democratic pile, forever in the shadow of the local MP. But we need good councillors much more than we need MEPs.